What's New at Nectar: Your Spring 2026 Product Roundup

We have been busy. This past quarter brought dozens of improvements across Recognition, Comms, and Challenges, a brand new partnership, and a first look at one of the biggest things we have ever built. Here is everything new, grouped by what it helps you do.

Featured: big moments, meet everyday recognition (Nectar + Kudoboard)

We are thrilled to announce a new partnership with Kudoboard, bringing together everyday appreciation and milestone celebration in one place. Nectar customers will be able to create and send Kudoboard's collaborative group cards and celebration boards right inside their recognition experience, perfect for birthdays, work anniversaries, promotions, retirements, and big team wins.

As our co-founder and CEO Trevor Larson put it, bringing these platforms together gives joint customers the best of both worlds. The integration begins rolling out to joint customers later this year. If you already use both tools today, talk to your CSM to learn more.

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Reach your whole workforce, not just the people at a desk

Internal communication only works if it actually reaches people. This quarter we made Nectar Comms work for every employee, including the frontline and deskless teams that email alone tends to miss.

• Texting and SMS for Comms. Send the same message across Email and SMS in a single send. Compose once, and Nectar formats it correctly for each channel. SMS is included, with configurable monthly quotas, and Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp (beta) are available too. For hourly, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing teams, this is the difference between a message that reaches half the company and one that reaches everyone.
• Plain text communications. Skip the design editor and send a simple text-based message across email, Slack, SMS, and Teams, with scheduling and analytics included.
• A refreshed Communications Hub with categories. A cleaner layout, plus admin-defined categories that show up as filters so employees can find the comm they are looking for fast.
• Auto-reply suppression. Stop out-of-office replies from flooding your inbox on bulk sends. Set it once and it applies to every future email comm.
• Link click analytics. See per-link click counts on any communication, and edit links even after a comm goes out.

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Recognition that reflects your culture

Recognition lands best when it speaks your company's language and reaches the right person. A batch of improvements this quarter made that easier.

• Rename "Core Values" to whatever fits you. Principles, Behaviors, Pillars, your call. The custom term flows through the shoutout composer, Home feed filters, and Leaderboards on web and mobile.
• Smarter recipient search. Job titles now appear alongside names in Shoutouts and Awards, so you never send recognition to the wrong Sarah again.
• Custom point allowances for peer-to-peer, plus bulk upload. Set individual P2P allowances per employee, and configure large teams in seconds with a CSV instead of one user at a time.
• More flexible Nominations. Customize form fields (rename, hide, reorder, add custom fields) and group nominations into named categories your employees can navigate.
• Richer analytics. The Manager report now includes a Department column, and the Shoutouts CSV export expanded from 6 fields to 20, with full sender and receiver metadata.
• On-demand translation. A simple Translate button on shoutouts and comments, just like the social platforms your people already use.

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A first look at Flows (now in beta)

This is the one we are most excited about. Flows is Nectar's automation engine, and it is now in beta. Think of it as a way to put the moments that matter on autopilot, without losing the human touch.

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Here are a few of the things you can already do with Flows:

• Welcome new hires before day one. With pre-onboarding provisioning, Nectar can set up an account for a future hire ahead of their start date, so your onboarding flow is already running when they walk in.
• Never miss a work anniversary. The new Work Anniversary trigger fires a flow automatically, whether that is a recognition message, a manager reminder, or a tenure milestone. You can target every anniversary or just specific years.
• Send to exactly the right people. Enrollment criteria on the Hire Date trigger let you filter who enters a flow before they are ever enrolled, using flexible AND and OR rules.
• Start fast with templates. A growing library of pre-built flows (New Hire Onboarding, Manager Engagement, and more) you can use as a starting point, plus the ability to save your own.
• Stay in control. Built-in error handling shows you who is blocked and why, with a Flow Health view and the ability to retry, skip, or remove a recipient.
• Build with less clicking. Notify and Send Communication steps are now unified into one streamlined step.

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Flows is rolling out toward general availability this summer. If you want early access, talk to your CSM.

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Challenges, leveled up

• Duplicate challenges within your workspace or across many workspaces at once, perfect for multi-location teams running the same program everywhere.
• Categories, a claimable-only filter, and claim history make challenges easier for admins to organize and easier for employees to navigate and track.

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Clara AI, rebuilt

Clara, Nectar's AI assistant, got a new engine. Clara now queries your platform data directly instead of working from a static snapshot, which means answers come back in seconds with materially higher accuracy. Clara also understands more of your program now, including Challenges, Awards, Nominations, Reward Spend, and Point Allocation. 

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Behind the scenes: integrations and admin

The headline here is a big one for payroll teams.

• Upgraded Workday Integration. Nectar now automatically sends reward-spend data to Workday for payroll, eliminating the manual export, reformat, and upload that payroll teams ran every single pay cycle. Your CSM sets it up with you, it runs automatically on your payroll schedule, hourly and salaried employees are handled separately, terminated employees are excluded automatically, and every submission is logged so you always have a record of what was sent and when. It is the kind of automation that quietly saves hours every pay period.

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A couple of smaller admin wins worth a mention:

• SFTP customer self-service. See your SFTP connection status and file import activity right in the app, with plain-English error reasons and notification options.
• Notification defaults that apply to everyone. When you update a notification default, the change now reaches existing users too, not just new ones, while preserving anyone's personal customizations.

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One more thing: keep an eye on Q3

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